GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 57156
URI "should" be case insensitive
Last modified: 2009-08-15 18:40:50 UTC
Discussion on Dia mailing list raised question: Is the namespace http://www.w3.org/2000/SVG or http://www.w3.org/2000/svg? I stated that it shouldn't matter: per RFC 2396 sections 3.1 and 6, URIs "should" be insensitive to case, following the lead of TBL's articles at the W3C. James Henstridge said that URI parsing was a function of libxml, and suggested you would consider this a bug if you agreed that case shouldn't matter. I won't argue my case (as it were) here. I thought I'd raise the question in the quietest, most specific way I could. I'm happy to provide more details should you need them. Thank you for libxml. --jkl
You are seriously wrong. The only insensitive parts of URIs are the ones affecting the hostname because the DNS is itself case insensitive (section 6) and the schemes (section 3.1). Everything else is case sensitive. And in the exasmple given I am 100% sure that you are totally wrong http://www.w3.org/2000/SVG and http://www.w3.org/2000/svg Do NOT identifies the same resource. For your informations I worked 5 years at W3C and as a result tends to know Tim relatively well, and I'm pretty sure he would be really pissed if someone suggested that his interpretation would be that URI should be case insensitive, it's REALLY, REALLY WRONG ! Last but not least, on the problem of namespace equivalence, the current status quo is that equivalence is only allowed if there is exact string matching of the namespace names (i.e. the URI References). I suggest you read th archives of the archives of the passionnate debates which occured on the xml-uri@w3.org list one year ago. http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-uri/ Which led at the end to a decision from the XML Coordination Group (which I'm a member of) to ban relative URI-References in namespace names and state that namespace names comparison should be an exact string matching. http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-uri/2000Jul/0005.html I think it's a good idea you didn't tried to raise this is a more general list discussion, seems you're not well prepared to discuss the matter :-) Daniel
Let's close this bug, Daniel
Agreed. For the record, the controlling standard is "Namespaces in XML" (REC-xml-names-19990114 found at http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/), which says "URI references which identify namespaces are considered identical when they are exactly the same character-for-character." --jkl
The URL field has been removed from bugzilla.gnome.org. This URL was in the old URL field, and is being added as a comment so that the data is not lost. Please email bugmaster@gnome.org if you have any questions. URL: http://www.w3.org/2000/SVG